The Problem
A UAE-based digital healthcare portal was running on Laravel 6.0 — a version that reached End-of-Life (EOL) in September 2022. A routine HIPAA compliance review flagged over 23 critical CVEs in their production stack, exposing patient data to potential security vulnerabilities. The portal needed an emergency upgrade without disrupting live patient appointment bookings and prescription history.
The Challenge
The codebase had 14 abandoned third-party packages with no modern replacements available. PHP 7.2 was hardcoded in several service classes using deprecated functions. The test suite had zero automated coverage. Upgrading incrementally through Laravel 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 each introduced breaking changes that had to be carefully catalogued and resolved. The team had a hard deadline of 8 weeks before their next compliance audit.
Our Solution
We structured the upgrade into 5 sprints:
• Sprint 1: Full dependency audit using Composer Rector, replaced all 14 EOL packages with maintained alternatives
• Sprint 2: PHP 7.2 → 8.1 compatibility pass, removing deprecated functions and updating syntax
• Sprint 3: Laravel 6→8 migration, resolving HTTP Client, Jetstream, and authentication breaking changes
• Sprint 4: Laravel 8→10 migration, updating Eloquent casting, Carbon, and middleware signatures
• Sprint 5: Laravel 10→11 migration, adopting new application bootstrap structure
• Wrote 140 integration tests covering all critical patient booking and prescription routes
• Used feature flags to deploy incrementally with zero patient-facing downtime
• Sprint 1: Full dependency audit using Composer Rector, replaced all 14 EOL packages with maintained alternatives
• Sprint 2: PHP 7.2 → 8.1 compatibility pass, removing deprecated functions and updating syntax
• Sprint 3: Laravel 6→8 migration, resolving HTTP Client, Jetstream, and authentication breaking changes
• Sprint 4: Laravel 8→10 migration, updating Eloquent casting, Carbon, and middleware signatures
• Sprint 5: Laravel 10→11 migration, adopting new application bootstrap structure
• Wrote 140 integration tests covering all critical patient booking and prescription routes
• Used feature flags to deploy incrementally with zero patient-facing downtime
The Result
The portal was fully migrated to Laravel 11 / PHP 8.2 in 7.5 weeks — half a week ahead of schedule. All 23 CVEs were patched and the compliance audit passed without exceptions. The codebase was reduced by 22% through modernisation, and the new test suite catches regressions automatically on every pull request.